Conventionally, as a tool for a drawing formation assistant means for a designer, in general, a CAD, a CAE, a CAM and the like are known. These tools have been used as a tool for helping a person in carrying out an exact and correct drawing formation of a machine such as a manufacture design drawing formation or a manufacture structure analysis drawing formation. However, recently, as one applied field of the CAD or the like, it is considered that an information processing system is used when a mechanism conceptional drawing for readily understanding an operation of a machine is formed from conventional drawings.
Conventionally, for the mechanism conceptional drawing formation method and apparatus for visually helping the understanding of a summarized operation of the mechanism of this kind, for example, as a means for exhibiting an operation of a machine, conventionally, trigonometric views, an exploded view, a perspective view, an operational view composed thereof aligned in operational order, and the like have been used for illustrating the structure and the shape of the machine, and mostly by using such views showing the exact form of the actual machine, the operation of the machine is explained.
However, the operation of the machine can not be readily understood by the explanation by using the the trigonometric views, the exploded view, the perspective view, the operational view and the like for showing the structure and the shape of the machine. In order to compensate for this problem, recently, for instance, a proposal for partly expressing mechanism drawings by using conceptional views as a conception approximate drawing method has been done. However, this proposal does not give details of a specific drawing method, and it is quite difficult to actually carry out the drawing formation by the method for expressing the mechanism drawings by using the conceptional views.
As described above, in the conventional drawing formation method, since the views drawn on the basis of the drawings illustrating the exact shape of the actual machine are used, the expression of the machine form is emphasized, and it is not enough to understand the operation of the machine. Also, the essence of the operation of the machine can not be explained well.
In order to overcome the aforementioned problem, the present invention is provided, and it is an object of the present invention to provide a mechanism conceptional drawing formation method capable of understanding an operation of a machine in a short time and a mechanism conceptional drawing formation apparatus capable of readily forming conceptional drawings with the aid of a computer in accordance with the mechanism conceptional drawing formation method.